Angels and the End of Everything
by liebedero
Summary: A two shot: Amy and Rory travel with the Doctor after the year of the slow invasion. But things are not the same. Amy can't shake this feeling of suffocation, being chased in her dreams, and Rory dreams about pain so sharp as his gladius, not physical, but there. And they both know that time is running out. Amy written in past, Rory in present tense.
1. Amy Blinked

Sometimes Amy felt as though she could see the future. Not like that…but rather, their own futures, now indeterminable, a resultant of the time spent with the Doctor. Running. Always and forever running. It was a mite scary, yeah, thinking about it, but she could see no other future. Running with Rory at her side, River and the Doctor not far ahead, forever, till the end.

It was dark in the bedroom around her; they had stopped home for her parents wedding anniversary. Rory's light snores and the ticking of her wristwatch on the nightstand the only sounds, and the glow from the alarm clock the only vestiges of light offered her, the shade being pulled down.

She cautiously stuck a leg out from under the covers, and then the other. She stood, padded out of the room, down the steps, minus the third, which she had to skip to avoid the creaking, and out onto the patio. It was bathed in moonlight, and she turned her face to the velveteen blanket of night.

She'd dreampt again. Of that indeterminable time ahead of them. The one time which they could never know, or visit. Their own futures. Part of it, she was sure, was the leftovers of the Days That Never Came. The version of reality where there was a crack in her bedroom wall, and fish custard was the strongest promise anyone could make.

The other part of her knew that it was another set of visions and times. She'd had all of time and space running through her head, so why shouldn't some things feel like déjà vu? River still came round on Thursday, and talked of her husband on occasion, but now that they were traveling with him again full time…

Though he never said it, she knew what the look Rory used to get on his face meant – it was for the best. But they had both thrown it out the window with a word from her father in law. She was Amy Pond – the mad, the impossible – and sometimes, just sometimes, she didn't care if it wasn't for the best anymore, even if they had gone full time again. Life was hard to live when you'd run with the Doctor. A normal, everyday sort of life, that is. They had found that out the hard way, trying so hard to commit to things. Rory going full time, she being a bride's maid…

She was just glad that she hadn't been having the dreams then. They wouldn't have helped her to settle. Now, with all the running, she could avoid them.

Screaming, footfalls pounding in her head, eyes watching her, malevolent voices, cold and unfeeling. A great stifling sort of feeling – nearly claustrophobic in a sense – threatening to stop her from breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling, even thinking. It muffled everything around her unbearably. Something was coming. No creature, or person. But rather the inevitable.

Rory would think her morbid.

That was one of the first things the Doctor had called her 'cheery girl, this one' he'd rambled sarcastically at her, not even truly meaning for her to hear him say so. Her whole life, she'd been misunderstood. She remembered the times in the other reality, when psychiatrists were evil blighters who she'd bite as soon as look at, much less listen too.

Amy Pond wasn't morbid. Amy Pond was a realist, with her head stuck in the clouds, but her feet firmly on the ground. Split, between childhood fantasy, and adult realisms.

Death was a very, very real thing.

The inevitable thing. Death always was, is and would be (she'd learned to think of things in all tenses, because time wasn't a straight line, and she knew that now, and it frightened her thinking about it, and how much her decisions played in her life, and where things connected and her mind was such a jumble how on earth did the Doctor ever manage to think straight at all?). Death was constant and forever.

She'd learned that young, in the other life. Running with the Doctor only cemented it.

And intuitively, Amy Pond knew that the stifling thing in her dreams was death. In many ways she thought of death now as the unending expanse that was outerspace – airless, scentless, uni-tactile, and black, with bright blotches.

Death was being lost in outerspace without the TARDIS air shell to help you breath.

She shivered, as she looked up at the death in the night sky.

Death followed the Doctor like a rat carried the plague. But all the same, if there was to be death, she'd want no one else by her side.

Amy Pond would embrace the blanket of night soon, the suffocating numbness of outerspace. Deep down, she knew it. Maybe, maybe it was always going to end this way for her. She'd done some reading up on the Schrödinger Theory of Quantum Mechanics in her free time.

She felt like Schrödinger's cat. Boxed into two realities, but each with the same outcome – death. It would always find her, always find the cat, no matter what. The poison of the Universe's box would blacken her blood, still her heart, and quiet her breathing, and soon.

"Please, Doctor, please, be with us when the end comes. I don't' care if you can't save me. If the end comes, it won't be right unless you're there with me. And it won't be your fault. I'm only human Doctor, Only human,"

Amy blinked.

She was going to die.

Amy blinked, turned, making her way back into the house, and up the stair, and went back to bed.

Before she slept, Amy blinked.


	2. Rory Blinks

When Rory sees the face in his dreams, he can't help but feel the dread sinking into his stomach like the blade of his gladius. The pain of the idea is what gets to him, sharp and stinging. He's a husband and a father. He's meant to protect those things which he loves the best: Amy, River, his Dad, the Doctor.

His family.

When he and Amy had sat down and explained to Brian about their lives…their daughter, and his granddaughter…her husband… he had listened with rapt attention - "Diligence is my Middle name," - and hadn't interrupted his son once, asking no questions until Rory and Amy had concluded their narrative.

But Rory had still seen the look in his father's eyes.

That look was the one that stung.

The look Rory himself had had when Amy had asked for a divorce.

The look Amy had had when they discovered her infertility.

River never carried that look. Not once. She still came round often, smiling and happy and he could tell that the Doctor was treating her well. They were seeing younger hers more and more often, still filled with 'wedding bliss' as Amy had put it.

So when Rory sees that face in his dreams, the face of the Doctor, he knows that something bad is coming. Something that will rip his heart to shreds. Something dark and dreadful and filled with as much pain as could two hearts hold. The face in his dreams cries.

The face in his dreams is one that Rory never wants to see in person.

He relegates it to the dreams, wishing and wanting happiness and only the adventures that he and Amy have with the Doctor. They travel on and on, stop home sometimes to say hello to Brian and check to see how he's watering the plants.

Amy doesn't sleep well at night.

They've been gone for another year. Eleven years and so much has been done. More than anyone else's normal eleven years could hope to span.

When Amy can't sleep, she pretends that she can.

Rory ignores it.

He can never sleep either.

The sense of foreboding creeps in on him every night and he chooses to ignore it, as Amy does, and just keep running. One night, Amy tells him what the Doctor said about not running away, but towards things which will one day fade.

Rory hears the unspoken, and sees it in her eyes.

They are fading.

Slowly, but surely fading away. Someday they will be gone. Rory can feel that day encroaching upon him, can feel the doom seeping through his veins, and chooses to ignore it in favour of enjoying the moment. When the Doctor thinks that they aren't watching, he can see in the ancient eyes and sort of bottomless sorrow. He's used to seeing that there, but never directed towards him or Amy. Always towards the past and memories and the deep dark pain that Rory know hides within the Doctor's heart.

A pain that they have tried to help heal.

When Rory can't sleep, he explores the TARDIS. Doors open to him that he's sure the Doctor avoids and tries to keep hidden. Sexy shows him things, he knows, because he's the pretty one and she fancies him. In a way, they are all her lovely shining children. The phrase 'children of time' comes unbidden to his mind sometimes, and he thinks that Sexy put it there.

When he sees rooms of companions come and gone, he never mentions anything to the Doctor, or to Amy. There is a room that is pink and yellow, a room with purples and hat boxes, and room that's light blue, with medical texts in it, which he sometimes peruses. A room that's a nice green hue and the nameplate says Sarah Jane. They all have name plates, and this one is displayed proudly.

He sees a door the colour of the TARDIS, with golden lights shining around it, brilliant red seeping from under the door. Circular Gallifreyan decorates it and he avoids this room; it smells of his daughter's perfume and the Doctor's cologne.

Rory has a room he likes best, and in it, he sits and thinks, reflects. This room, he knows, the TARDIS created especially for him. The walls are covered in photographs. They depict he and his wife, his daughter, and his son in law.

The room is filled with love, and he leaves the dread in his heart outside the door; this one room cannot be tainted with the knowledge he holds that the end is nearing for him. For Amy.

Slowly, the blurred pictures which protect him from spoilers, grow smaller and smaller in number. He has done more and more, and there is less and less coming, but only when he leaves the room does he realize the implications.

Rory is two thousand and thirty-one now. Or thirty-one. He never really knows for sure, though he favours the first. Life is long and hard and disappointing and it hurts. It hurts so much.

But the pictures on the wall are his hope, and his happiness.

The walls are so covered now, he can't even see the green and orange striped walls. There's a little shelf with his favourite books sat upon it, and he reads them when there is free time. And when he glances to the ceiling, the stars and the moon reflect the time of the Roman Empire, which had grown to be a comforting sight over the years.

As Amy tosses beside him, then suddenly grows still, he can't be sure whether it's a result of them sleeping in a foreign bed – it's her parents wedding anniversary, and the Doctor had dropped them home for a couple days – or whether she, like him, could feel it coming.

He feels her leave the bed, and he closes his eyes as she pads past him. Once she's gone from the room, he stands, surely and deftly avoiding the creaks in the floor and opens the bottom drawer. The gladius lays there, shining in the light from the alarm clock.

Before she can return, Rory has packed in his bag, along with his full garb. He blinks.

Better safe than sorry.

Because if he has to die one more time, that doesn't mean that anyone else has to, and he will fight for them. All of them. To the death.

Before he falls asleep, Amy beside him once more, Rory blinks.


End file.
